


Savant

by Dead_Waltzer



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: F/M, Heavy Angst, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Graphic Violence, Slight Canon Divergence, allusions to real crimes/criminals, and Misa's a little, explores L's backstory, poor babies, references to real events, regarding misa and light acting as kira whilst working with L
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:34:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22741822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dead_Waltzer/pseuds/Dead_Waltzer
Summary: Savant; a person of learningespecially : one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature)L Lawliet has been called a savant by the uneducated for years. Now, he sees how complex the definition really is.
Relationships: Amane Misa/L
Comments: 7
Kudos: 52





	Savant

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, all! This is my first fanfiction on Ao3!
> 
> I'm not invested much in anime and manga anymore, but reviewing Death Note, my heart ached at the chemistry between L and Misa. The only characters that are mine are Naghwe and her daughter, and L's biological family. Enjoy!
> 
> note: this story is technically a one-shot, but I sometimes go back and make edits if I think something is off or I notice a problem with grammar and formatting. So it might change a tad.

____

####  Savant; a person of learning especially : one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature)

L Lawliet’s hair falls below his eyes; dark bags of skin hang under his lower lash line from lack of sleep. His clothes have not been washed for days. When he works in Canada or the United States, some English-speaking country, he hears whispers of savant behind him as he sits, awkwardly perched atop his chair and hen-pecking keys on his laptop.

It is true that L Lawliet is a savant, that is, a person of learning (he has learned much in his twenty-four years on Earth). It is also true that he fits the criteria of savant ie especially: one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature). In his case, the interdisciplinary sociological field of law and criminal justice. 

However, whispers of savant do not speak to this definition. Instead, L understands the English-speakers’ designation of savant when describing him to mean 

savant syndrome  
: the condition in which a person having a developmental disorder (such as autism or intellectual disability) exhibits exceptional skill or brilliance in some limited field (such as mathematics or music)  


This is technically incorrect. L Lawliet has been psychologically evaluated before, as is routine for those at Wammy’s Home for Gifted Children. He had been screened, certainly, for Asperger’s Syndrome and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But at eight years old, he walked away only with diagnoses of acute post-traumatic stress disorder and comorbid anxiety, depression, and chronic insomnia due to a near-death experience a year earlier. Post-traumatic stress symptoms occurred, Wammy had explained, because the victim fears for their life in a specific moment. The sense that one is in danger never leaves them completely.

In L’s case, this event had been the assasination of his mother in 1989. Her name was Patrizia Lewis. She was half-Italian and half-English. She had graduated valedictorian of Oxford University at twenty years old and spoke eight languages fluently. She had been intelligent enough to expose the inner workings of the Sicilian Mafia in less time than any hired investigator could have, working half as hard as they did. She had been reckless enough to forgo governmental protection for her work. L would never forgive her for taking himself and his father on a drive to the empty beach one late winter afternoon in Agrigento. He did not remember their deaths. He had only been told later that his father had hid him in the trunk of the car and he’d been found, passed out, hours after two clean, crisp shots were fired. Patrizia had been a reckless, stupid woman. But she would surpass her son in years lived.

Many nights at Wammy’s, L could not sleep, but he was in good company. Other children cried at night, other children woke up, not breathing, from nightmares of their more nightmarish pasts. He had not been alone, those happy years at Wammy’s, and he had not been an outcast. The other children would clamor around him at one or two am as he rattled off the answers to tomorrow’s homework assignment between mouthfuls of Drumstick Squashies or Maltesers. Sometimes, other kids would bring him treats and ask him for help with schoolwork, or a side project of their own. L felt almost like a member of the Roman Pantheon, back then, other children providing offerings in exchange for his help. At first, these exchanges were businesslike, professional. But soon, he became wrapped up in the worlds and workings of his classmates, a benevolent deity who was not only respected but loved, notorious for his insatiable sweet tooth and even more insatiable, inconceivably brilliant mind.  
Trauma and anger was normal in this house, and intelligence was revered. L had loved his brothers and sisters dearly, and they had loved him as well. Little by little, each one left Wammy’s to do something spectacular: study astrophysics or direct award-winning films, win grand chess tournaments or engineer groundbreaking medical technology.

L was no savant (ie, savant syndrome) in that his brilliance knew no bounds. He could have done anything Wammy graduates do, and done them at the top of any such field. But he stayed caged in too long, the brightest star amongst the constellations, because Wammy had not yet thought about how to put his talents to best use.  
“Your mother,” Wammy had said one evening, when L was fourteen. L had not yet learned to act as stoic and aloof as he can now. He had noticeably stiffened, bristled, stared back square in the eye with the type of teenage rebelliousness that made old men like Wammy chuckle. L had not yet learned to respect the man, and he drew back, disgusted at his nonchalance.

“She was brilliant,” Wammy continued, “you don’t want to be like her, do you? You avoid investigation work because...why? Because you’re afraid of ending up like her?”

“Shut up,” L had said. “Shut up, you don’t know-- you have no idea about me!”

Wammy just looked at L then, looked at him like he was one of the precious, unique, dead little white moths that were pinned above the entomology bookshelf in the library. L recoiled, and stalked out of the room. He knew that Wammy had not moved from his spot, had not changed positions even slightly, because the chair he sat in creaked and groaned with any hint of motion. Changing the direction of his stride down the hall, L had stopped at one doorway experimentally, then another. Back in the study, he heard the chair creak every time he did so, as Wammy turned to observe him.

What a disgusting creep. L would never turn into that.

__  


“Why are you staring at me, you creep?” Amane Misa, otherwise known as the Japanese idol Misa-Misa, draws back in disgust when she sees L watching her from over his laptop. L chuckles a low chuckle.

“Misa is pensive about something, I can tell,” he says, running off in fluent Japanese. His father had spoken Japanese to him as a child, Japanese and Russian, and L had absorbed the languages like he’d absorbed the rest of his father. Old, forest-smelling cologne that women apparently liked, dark brown eyes that crinkled when he’d smiled. His father had been a charming man. Nothing like L, aforementioned pale and spindly “creep”, nervously chewing his cuticles as he observes Misa. L’s father had had a picture of his own mother that proudly hung across the family fireplace, back when L was a child and had had his own fireplace and his own family. It had been when she was young, and her large, almond-shaped eyes reminded him of Misa’s eyes, although Misa’s were larger and heavily made up.

“I’m not pensive, you weirdo,” Misa replies. “I’m just thinking.”

“Thinking means pensive,” he holds back a smile, but Misa’s instincts are good. She hears the smile in his voice anyways and smiles in spite of herself.

“Alright, so I’m pensive,” she says, then flops onto the couch and flips open an idol magazine. L looks over her shoulder at the thin, bikini-clad models she is observing. Her lips are curled in distaste as she carefully scrutinizes each and every individual face. Her knuckles grip the pages so that they can almost tear. In addition to this, the magazine issue is local, and the models are extremely modest in comparison to someone of Misa’s stature. She had never been fazed by minor celebrities before, not unless there was a chance that…

“Oh, is Light-kun interested in other women?” L asks, taking joy in seeing Misa jump off the couch at him.

“Ryuzaki!” she says, “Of course not! He loves me!”

“Those models are very sexy,” L observes.

“You’re such a perv,” Misa says, but flopped back down on the couch as though she finds L’s jabs and teasing normal by now.

Yagami Light frequently displays faux interest in women when he believes himself to be under suspicion, L has noted. Amane Misa’s anxiety surrounding her relationship is an easy gauge of how closely Light is holding her, and thus how much suspicion he feels the two of them are under collectively.

Later that evening, L Lawliet calls Wammy into his office. “Tell me more about Misa,” he says, simply.

___  


A decade is plenty of time for a man to change his mind.

“Naghwe,” he’d said when he embraced his friend upon her return to Wammy’s house. He was eighteen, she was twenty-seven. She had been seventeen when she’d taken him in, tended to his emotional scars, and held his small hand through his first year at Wammy’s. Her hand now rested over her protruding stomach, the first Wammy legacy born in the new millenium. “You shouldn’t go back to Germany. What you wrote about the NSU murders, I am afraid that…”

“L,” Naghwe said, “these people need me. Their families need me. I’ll be safe, I promise you.”

“Your child can’t promise me that,” L had said, and N had laughed at him, ruffling his hair like she had when he was a little boy.

She hadn’t been killed in Germany, no, nothing like that. She gave birth to a little girl, had a cozy little family last he’d checked, but L found that he couldn’t keep checking for long. He was certain that one day, she’d be wiped off this planet alongside her husband and child.

“N was one of the best deductive minds I’d ever seen,” Wammy said to L that day in the study, “besides you.”

“She is reckless,” L had said, absentmindedly chewing his cuticles and not looking up from his book on Nikola Tesla. The classic autistic savant caricature (retrospectively diagnosed, of course, as all great autistic savant caricatures are) fascinated him. The man was really something, having fallen in love with a pigeon like a man does a woman. Better a pigeon, L thought darkly, than a man or woman who could give you a family to protect and fear for. “Her husband, her children. She can’t keep taking these cases without making sure they’re alright.”

“Do you want to take the load off her a bit?” Wammy had said. “You could go head to head with a mother of...what was it now? Three, four?”

L dropped his hand on the book. “Four?” He was shocked. Outraged. How could Naghwe put four young children in danger while she dug up dirt on criminals?

“I might be getting four new additions to my house,” Wammy said. L had gotten smarter, these last four years, and he knew when Wammy was faking nonchalance. He was scared. So was L.”Unless you want to run her to the ground.”

“I’ll never put a loved one in danger for my job,” L hissed, and returned to his book. What it would be like to be Tesla, he thought, dead and only a pigeon left to mourn you. Tesla was so off-putting, you couldn’t particularly blame anyone for avoiding the guy. Maybe that was the key to being a successful genius. L bit too hard on his cuticle, winced, and drew back, observing the blood that pooled on his finger. His fingernails looked disgusting, and he hadn’t showered in a few days. And you couldn’t have paid him five thousand pounds to care.

Savant syndrome, Nikola Tesla, he thought to himself. The image of the mad genius and a pigeon, alone together with no attachments at all, never quite left his mind.

___  
Amane Misa. Born to a Japanese Catholic family on Christmas day. She was named for Christmas Mass, L read. Surprisingly, she had an exceptional junior high school academic record and excelled in various extracurricular activities. She was discovered as a model and idol as a young teenager. She would have had a bright future ahead of her if not for…

Trauma. L’s gut wrenches and he only returns to the case half an hour and a Xanax later. Even through the sedative haze, his mind whirs and clicks quickly, intricately along her life story, taking no detail for granted. 

Murder of her parents in front of her. Another Xanax. L will get to that one later, when he’s desensitized himself to the description of her orphaning. For now, his hazy mind notes: inception of disillusionment with current criminal justice system. Beginnings of pro-Kira sympathy

Attempted sexual assault and/or murder. Her attacker dying, mysteriously, in front of her. Note suspicion of Shinigami involvement and/or proto-Kira activity. 

Wammy has included forum posts by fans, detailing their desire for Misa-Misa in his reports. Explicit descriptions of sexual fantasies. Sickening, shallow love. The kind of love that consumes and possesses. This is the kind of love that Misa has known since her family died, and the kind she projects towards her sociopathic boyfriend. Note: supported by many for sex appeal. Charming personality, multiple connections

How anyone could hate this girl, L doesn’t know. He is not in a position to discredit anyone with a history of trauma, no matter how crazy their activities. A few of his brothers and sisters at Wammy’s have seen less than Misa has, and have done things more gruesome and pointless, far more gruesome and pointless, with their own bare hands sometimes, without being manipulated by a hypnotic genius with a God complex. It hurt like Hell to bring them to justice.

He flicks to the next page of the report. He freezes when he sees the transcript. 

Interrogation notes. Things that she said that the camera recorder did not pick up on, but her guards evidently did. Prayers to God and to Jesus in Japanese, humming Christmas hymns. Calling for her mother and father. Fuck, he didn’t realize… Misa, I’m sorry, he thinks to himself, though his blank expression does not change (force of habit, at this point).

At the bottom of the page, Wammy has scrawled “possible catharsis and possible manipulative behavior. Potentially a psycho-social mixture of the two.” Very clinical writing, L thinks. He has loved Wammy like a father for years, but old, complex feelings of disgust with Wammy and with himself bubble up in his chest again. He flicks to the next page.

A transcript of her speaking to an anonymous listener a few moments before she is arrested.

“I’ll just play the pathetic little orphan girl, Rem,” she’d apparently said, “Christmas hymns, mommy and daddy, that stuff. They go easy on me, everyone does!” "Potential conspirator: Rem" is written in red ink next to the typed words.

L sets the papers down with a thud. That bitch almost had him. Had **him**. “Were you fooled?” Wammy’s mocking script follows the transcript. “Amane displays strength in the field of emotional manipulation and deceit. This is perhaps why only a sociopath could survive dating her. Keep an eye on your heart around that one.”

___

“Ryuzaki!” Misa calls from outside the complex. She has been escorted out for a day at a restaurant of her choosing, careful attention paid to her spending choices and interactions with employees. Really, L just wants her to feel more at ease in the complex. He will not present himself as an enemy to her. Light will never be fooled into thinking L is his friend, but Misa, with her emotional reasoning, may be a way into the inner workings of the duo. “Let me in! It’s freezing out there, and I’m not totally in the building yet!”

L studies Misa for a time, hiding his smile under the thumb he is chewing on, and she grows even more visibly irritated. “You’re so weird! Lemme in!”

“Pounding on the glass,” he speaks into an intercom that connects to the speaker near Misa, “will not make me let you in any sooner.”

“What do you want?” Misa asks, huffing.

“I will finish my cake,” L says, “then I will allow you into the building.”

Leisurely, he scoops another bite of cake into his mouth and chews slowly, only making eye contact with Misa when he has finished his snack. This is a display of dominance, but it’s also a way of having fun. Misa’s expressions are hilarious to watch. Right now, she looks like she’s ready to punch him in the face if he ever has the ill wisdom to let her near him.

He swipes the card at his desk and lets her in.

“What the--” she huffs, stomping up to him. “I’m freezing my ass off out there, while you… you…” 

For emphasis, she merely slams her fist down on the desk, but he only turns back to his computer. He begins to review the list of errors in the surveillance system over the past week (routine work is something even a detective must deal with) when she impulsively slams his laptop shut.

“My work is more important than your tantrum, Miss Amane,” L says airily.

“Oh, fuck you,” Misa replies. “I’m more important than your cake.”

“No, you are not,” L says.

“Yes, I am,” she insists.

“Oh?” L raises an eyebrow. “And how do you know?”

“Because you don’t lock your cake up for days at a time and make someone escort it out to a restaurant, and into the bathroom with it, you creep,” she adds for emphasis.

“My apologies, Miss Amane, but I did allow you to select a female agent who would--”

“Yeugh, enough!” Misa shrieks, “Point is, I’m more important than your cake, and I proved it to you!”

“Well done,” L says dryly, “I am the world’s greatest detective, but Misa has bested me. Maybe you should succeed me in my endeavors.”

Misa pauses and cocks her head at him, staring at him with a sudden intensity. L once again feels like a moth on a pin board, but also feels a wave of heat creep up his neck. He meets her eyes easily.

“You’re being sarcastic,” she says, simply. 

“Yes,” says L, and realizes where he went wrong. He has been cultivating a savant syndrome, Nikola Tesla persona, and the other cops and even Light himself take for granted that sarcasm is beyond L. Misa alone has detected this discrepancy.

Misa stares at him at a few moments more, then slowly lowers herself down on the desk, so she is looking up at him through large brown eyes and long lashes. She’s quite attractive, but whatever stirrings L has at the moment (and he has some) he can easily control. He simply stares back at her vacantly.

“Why,” says Misa languidly, “do you pretend to be a creep?”

L sticks his face closer to hers, so they are almost touching noses. He stares right into her big, beautiful eyes with a vacant expression. Misa shrieks and pulls back.

“I am a creep,” he says, and Misa huffs and spins on her heel and walks away.

Be careful around her, he thinks to himself. She has something the others don’t.

___

“That man’s scary,” Naghwe’s daughter whispers to her mother in Turkish. L is hunched over his desk, working on the latest criminal justice case. Naghwe joins him every so often, occasionally pointing out something that he’s missed, for all his brilliance. She still has seniority.

“I speak Turkish,” L says casually in Turkish. Naghwe laughs and shushes the little girl. None of her children, two sons and two daughters, have displayed their mother’s uncanny deductive ability, though they’re all intelligent. It is called regression towards the mean, and Naghwe’s little girl really has no business in his office. She’s far too stupid. She’ll never understand what he or her mother is doing here.

L tells Naghwe this, in Russian, while the girl plays at her feet.

“Lawliet!” Naghwe says. “What’s gotten into you? Why are you acting like this?”

“Like what?” L says, mouth full of Skittles. 

“Where are your table manners? When did you last take a shower? You always liked sweets, but this?” she says, gesturing to the assortment of refined sugars in front of them. Naghwe is clearly channeling her inner mother full-time now.

“I have no partner to impress,” L says simply. 

“This isn’t you,” Naghwe says, “Not the Lawliet I knew.”

L brushes his hand along his untrimmed hair. “This is my hair,” he says.

Naghwe stares at him. “It is mine, and it is part of me. Sometimes, when I was young, I trimmed it and tried to control it, because I wanted approval. As we all do,” he continued, and now her expression changes as she understood what he was saying.

“This,” he gestures to the mess in front of him, “I also controlled, to make friends, to find love. That’s what you’ve done, too. But I don’t want children, or a family. My mother did, and it caused us pain. Love is evil, you may fall in love with a goat.” This is a Russian saying. L wonders if his father ever heard it. He must have, growing up in Russia, but L wishes that his father had heeded that advice.

Naghwe looks down, ashamed. Her daughter looks up then, sensing something is off, and Naghwe scoops her up into her arms, holding her tightly. She looks back at L, who quickly averts his gaze.

“This is me,” he says, “but it’s me unafraid of people anymore.”

“Or more afraid,” says Naghwe. They are both simultaneously right and wrong, and they both know it.

____

“I still think you’re less creepy than you act,” says Misa, plopping down in front of L in his office. She has been given more leeway in the complex, per his attempts to connect with her. For a moment, she reminds him of Naghwe’s daughter, now going to an elite junior high school in France. He knows this from what Wammy tells him; he has not spoken to Naghwe herself in years. 

“That is your presumption,” says L. He knows that she’ll continue. He’s waiting for her response.

“I’m right,” she says, “you’re plenty smart. You could be _nearly_ as charismatic and good-looking as Light. Plus, a really creepy guy would take being told that he’s not creepy as a compliment. He wouldn’t deflect it! I’m a celebrity, I know creepy guys.”

Yes, you do, he thinks sadly. But this is all a very suspicious thing of Misa to say. L meets her eyes, levelled at his own. He half-expects them to be faux seductive, oozing with fake attraction, assuming she’s trying to tease him or get him to let his guard down. Instead, she simply looks back at him, coldly.

“You,” he says slowly, “are more intelligent than you let on, in turn.” 

This satisfies her. “How do you know?”

“Because I am smarter than you,” he says, looking back at his computer, and he can see her deflate out of the corner of his eye. 

“You’re still a jerk,” she says, coming up to him. “a genuine one.”

“I am merely stating a fact, Miss Amane,” L says, “upon psychological evaluation, my IQ exceeds Misa's by approximately three and a third standard deviations, controlling for differences in our respective national testing practices and the difficult circumstances of your evaluation. You lack my exceptional analytical ability, conceptualization power, and working memory. Although you display normative strengths in the areas of nonverbal learning and processing, discriminatory ability, social savvy and…”

She leans forward and kisses him harshly. Oh.

“...spontaneity,” he finishes, adding after a beat, “strategic spontaneity, that is.”

“I’m an actor,” she says, “and so are you.” Her gaze is cold and calculating again. 

Misa is willing to partake in amorous relations with him. Further evaluation for this sudden change in behavior is needed. Spontaneity is not surprising for Misa. Interest in Ryuzaki is.

___

He can barely keep his eyes open. He had promised that he’d stay aware, focused, on this night with her, but she tore him to pieces and put him back together again in his mind. He pants, undone, pressing a hand to his forehead. After a few moments, he collects himself and sees her staring at him, eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

“You act weird and creepy because you don’t want this,” she says, “you don’t want to have a girlfriend, or anything. No bigwig detective would. I get that.”

He thought he was playing her, but right now he’s in her element, seduction and emotional...affairs. He will need to get an upper hand on her, sooner or later.

She almost squeals in surprise, but not protest, when he pulls her back on top of him.

___

Light shows no sign of suspicion or interest in Misa. He never has. L has considered that he put her up to this, put her up to their relationship, but Misa’s insistent avoidance of him these days, except their nights together, and her attempts to keep Light from L speak to her acting on her own, which she frequently does. 

L hides his emotions well. When they speak, he finds Light’s disregard for his girlfriend both disgusting and hilarious. Looking past L’s gaze, confident, airy, Light speaks of Misa’s devotion to him with fake sincerity. He really has no idea, the damned idiot.

That night, L makes her cum in bed until she’s a heaving wreck beside him. He holds her like Light’s never held her, and she relaxes. She’s been scared sick this whole time, he realizes. She’s been terrified. Her ribs are too thin, and her BMI likely does not exceed 18. He may send in some of the foods she’s been noted to enjoy later.

He waits for her to warm up in his arms. She begins to go to sleep, before he reminds her that Light will be suspicious if she starts having sleepovers with him. He finds that he cannot contain his amused smile.

The name “Light” triggers something in her, and she scurries off, half-angry, half-embarrassed, while L watches her go. He has had sex during or even for his investigations before, but he really likes this girl. It says something awful about him, definitely.

___

Misa wipes off her makeup and steps into the shower. She has not been a virgin in twenty-six days, not since that first night with Ryuzaki (an alias, she now knows, although it's hard to think of him as anyone other than "Ryuzaki" at this point). She has returned to being Kira for forty days, since she met Ryuk. 

Light is a genius, but he’s too dim about those sex things to know… She had promised to save herself for marriage and God at her confirmation. She never, in a million years, would have thought she’d save herself for marriage to a god. And so it must be appropriate that she didn’t. 

"Ryuzaki" reminds her too much of that old scientist she watched a biopic about in school. Who was it…? Nikolai Tesla or something? Anyways, the man’s funny. A little real funny, a lot fake funny. Controlled funny, the type they teach comic actors in school. His socially inappropriate statements were weird at first, but then she realized how on-the-nose they were, how they tapped into exactly what would make others chuckle in the moment, or make them mad. His teasing her about Light and modeling, for example, then his supposed obliviousness at her anger, in spite of his intelligence. He’s like a cartoonish Nikolai Tesla that a comic actor had thought up to play in a movie.

During their nights together, she opens him up, little by little, and then he pulls back into that persona. If he thought that it was impeding the investigation to drop the persona, to have sex with her at all, he just wouldn’t have sex with her, wouldn’t even begin to let his mannerisms slide. He could be trying to get in her good graces, or think something’s wrong with Light because she wants to sleep with another guy (something wrong with Light-- what a joke!) but she’s the best actor in the complex. She won’t let him read her. She just wants a bit of fun, and to understand him a little more. He’d begun to drift off last night, when she was playing with his hair, but she flicked him on the forehead and told him she was going to go meet Light. That was payback for what he’d said to her a few nights before! And he’d retreated into himself like a snail in its shell. She’d felt a pang of regret, lying in her own bed that night.

She remembers when she was a little girl, and she had time to read more than just fashion and diet magazines. Occam’s razor says to assume the simplest explanation. Misa remembers how scared of sex she was after her parents died, after the attempted murder, before she met her Light and her god. How scared she was of men, anyone, really. Not just because they might hurt her, but because they might get hurt.

He seems afraid. He seems afraid, like she was, before she stepped into her chosen destiny. The poor man, Misa thinks, and she realizes that she means it unironically, and she’s crying in the shower. That poor man, and we mean to kill him…

Her face will be hot and puffy anyways, when she gets out. No one will notice. Well, at least not Light.  
____

She’s won, tonight. Every hot, daring night together is a battle of wills, and while Misa is no match for L’s wit, her willpower…

She waits, perched on the edge of the bed, for him to collect himself. L pants, his chest rising and falling rapidly and his arms relaxed, dropping off the side of the bed. Bruises line his neck as his mind clears again, as his rational facilities begin to turn back on. He’ll be ill with the flu for a few days, so that Light won’t see the bruises and L will have time to consider his situation with Misa. Given his poor hygiene, sleep and dietary practices, illness should not be implausible. Finally, he catches his breath. Misa waits intently to hear what he’ll say to her after she vanquished him, yet again.

“He doesn’t love you, you know,” L says, “he never will. I’m being serious.”

“How do I know?” she says. She’s expected this stuff by now. No one can help but fall in love with her. Poor guy, trying to win her away from Light. Really. Poor guy...

“Only you know how you know,” L says, “I’m just telling you, you know.”

“Drop the act,” Misa says flatly. 

“The act’s been dropped,” he replies, “My statement stands. But you’re too far-gone to listen to me.”

Misa huffs off that night, and L regrets hurting her. His words may have seemed bold, but he only said them to her because he knew they wouldn’t change her mind. Misa's reckless behavior does not appear to be temporally correlated with any changes that he's observed in Light. It is more likely than not that Misa's interest in him is the result of emotional neglect on Light's part, and not strategically planned. 

However, both Miss Amane and Mr. Yagami have begun to steadily shift their responses to task force questioning in a manner that L understands to be similar how they did when he first met them, when they were actively committing murder. If Misa ever believed herself to be a normal girl, she certainly does not now. And even if L feels something for her, he knows that she will choose the man who avenged her when God and earthly justice failed. L is just another cog in a broken system to that girl, and sleeping with her is going to be an emotional liability on his part.

She will kill him. Their bridge had been burned before it was ever built, and he realizes that now.

____

When Misa remembered her past, and when she remembered her future as Kira, she also remembered his name.

A foreigner named Ryuzaki or Hideki Ryuuga was weird enough (maybe his mom had watched too many Japanese soap operas, she’d figured), but who names their kid L Lawliet?

What lay in this man’s past? Her eyes could not see into that. It was what she asked herself as his own dark eyes, wild and alive, roamed her body. Numbers flickered above his head that she tried to ignore. She transformed him into someone else those nights, someone he had been hiding. What else had he been hiding?

“Give me his name,” Light demands, and Misa can’t, won’t say no to her Light.

Instead, she says, “I don’t remember.” This is a lie, but she’s a good liar. Even Light accepts her response begrudgingly. 

She has found that she cannot kill that man, even if his days are numbered anyhow. He has beaten her at her own game.

____

####  Savant; a person of learning especially : one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature)

L writes "savant" across Misa’s profile in large, inky black letters. The task force officers who visit him tactfully refrain from commenting on his neck, although a few of them look bemused, and others envious. 

Amane Misa, normative strengths in discriminatory ability and nonverbal processing. Good instincts, good social skills. Observant. If you try to play her game, you may almost lose. Even if you’re the world’s greatest detective. 

“Miss Amane sent this to you, sir,” an aide comes up to L. “It’s been screened for substances. It’s just… it appears to be...normal cake.”

L picks up the note next to the cake. “I guess this is really what you want, not me~ Misa-Misa” it reads, next to a sad cartoonish sketch of Misa. It’s good, too, clear lines and over the top teary eyes. Did she draw this herself? Note: add “artistic ability” to her normative strengths.

L chuckles in spite of himself, his own genuine laughter that he only hears now when he’s with her. Then he almost chokes on his laughter and feels a sense of dread and defeat wash over him.

He truly does not want to kill this girl. Who in their right mind could hate her? 

She’s the Second Kira… the less deranged version of his mind reminds him. He acquiesces to it after a few moments.

Yes, Amane Misa is not a force to be trifled with. He underlines the word “savant” on her profile and throws the cake out.

-end-

**Author's Note:**

> Some of the references to Autistic Savants and Savant Syndrome come from my experience as someone on the spectrum who is frustrated by our depictions in pop culture and public consciousness. So my interpretation of L is not that he has Asperger's. I do understand and respect that some other Aspie fans believe that he does, so this is just my interpretation.
> 
> This could be seen as canon divergence, but I'm inclined to believe that the rest of the story plays out like it did in canon, unfortunately. ;_;


End file.
